Chapter 15 - My Father's MistakeI wanted to push the binder away. My father had been the one honest place I could return to in my head. Now Carmen was saying he'd accepted money from people who cheated workers.

“How much?” I asked.

“€20,000 in the currency conversion shown here.”

“Why?”

“That's the part he came back to explain.”

Carmen produced another letter, signed and dated by Dad. In it he acknowledged accepting funds to settle urgent supplier debts at his store, believing they were repayment for legitimate deliveries. When he later learned the payments were connected to falsified invoices, he tried to return the money and document the irregularities.

“He wasn't innocent of every bad decision,” Carmen said. “But he didn't know the money was dirty when he accepted it. Once he knew, he wouldn't stay quiet.”

I read the letter until the words blurred. Dad had taught me to own my mistakes, and apparently he'd had a mistake of his own to own.

“Why didn't he tell me?”

“He was ashamed.”

I thought of the unpaid wages, the lost businesses, the people who had trusted my father to make deliveries. Shame could explain silence. It couldn't excuse it. Both truths sat heavily beside each other.

Lucía asked Carmen whether she would testify to what she knew, clearly separating firsthand observations from things others had told her. Carmen said she would consider it after receiving legal advice. It wasn't a movie confession that solved the case. It was a real person trying to stop hiding.

That night my mother and I sat on the balcony of her house. She brought a wool blanket and put it over our knees, the way she'd done when I was a child.

“Your dad wasn't perfect,” she said.

“I know.”

“You're allowed to be angry with him.”

“I am.”

“Does that change how he loved you?”

I remembered his hands stained with blue paint as he helped build my first studio shelves. “No,” I whispered. “But it changes what I know.”

My phone rang. Javier.

I considered letting it go. Instead, I answered on speaker with my mother beside me.

“Clara,” he said. “I found your father's letters. Mom was going to destroy them.”

“Where are they?”

“I can bring them back. But Sergio knows I've started talking.”

A door slammed on his end of the call. Javier whispered, “He's here.”

Then the line went dead.

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